L.A. Times sues city over Mayor Bass' deleted text messages during fire response

Yahoo

28-03-2025

The Los Angeles Times filed a lawsuit Thursday against the city of L.A., accusing officials of unlawfully withholding and deleting the mayor's text messages and other public records from January's firestorm.
The city has already turned over many of the exchanges between Mayor Karen Bass and other officials sought by Times reporters. But officials have argued they are not compelled to do so under state public records laws.
The Times disagreed. Empowering public officials to scrub their records or to decide which are subject to the law sets a dangerous precedent, Thursday's suit argued.
"It's bigger than these text messages," said Kelly Aviles, outside counsel for The Times. "The city seems to believe they can destroy whatever they want whenever they want, and that they don't have a duty to the public to retain public records."
Read more: L.A. mayor's text messages provide vivid window into early fire response
Politics reporter Julia Wick and investigative reporter Matt Hamilton joined the action as L.A. residents, aiming to block city officials from destroying protected material.
Bass was in Ghana when the fires broke out on Jan. 7. She joined a Biden administration delegation feting the country's new president, despite warnings about the explosive potential of incoming Santa Ana winds.
That choice may well decide her political future. Exchanges published by The Times this week gave the first clear picture into the mayor's early actions as the city caught fire and burned.
Yet those exchanges with her staff and senior government officials could have remained secret, since Bass' messages had been set to auto-delete after 30 days — far shorter than the two-year retention period outlined in the city's administrative code.
Officials initially told Wick those texts did not exist, and then said that they had been deleted. After months of back and forth with the paper, the mayor's office ultimately said it was able to recover the deleted texts, and last week provided about 125 messages, noting that an unspecified number of others were 'redacted and/or withheld' based on exemptions to the law.
"The Mayor's office has responded to hundreds of public records requests since she was elected and we will continue to do so," said David Michaelson, counsel to the mayor. "The Mayor's office released responsive texts to a PRA request from the Times last week and the Office will continue to respond to public record requests."
Read more: LAFD actions in Palisades fire shrouded in secrecy as city refuses to release records
Still, Michaelson told Wick the texts were beyond the reach of the California Public Records Act.
The mayor's texts were "ephemeral," Michaelson told Wick in a March 7 email, and thus protected from public scrutiny. He cited a 1981 Supreme Court decision that cast "fleeting thoughts and random bits of information" as exempt from records requests.
But that ruling does not apply to officials' text messages and other electronic communication, Times attorneys argued. In an era of life-or-death decisions made on six-inch screens, the paper's suit makes the case that what politicians type with two thumbs is as durable as what they pen by hand. Under California law, any writing about public business, regardless of format, is covered by the records act and must be turned over.
"The City's apparent position that an official may delete a text communication at any time as 'ephemeral' until a public records request is received would destroy the presumption of access to public records," The Times' lawsuit said. "All a public official would have to do to avoid public scrutiny is destroy the texts immediately after creating them."
The mayor's texts are not the only records City Hall appears to have destroyed, the lawsuit alleged. Nor are they the only ones the paper's journalists are still seeking as part of their ongoing investigation of the fires. On Jan. 9, investigative reporter Alene Tchekmedyian sought "emails, text messages, reports, planning documents and memos — about fire planning and predeployment resources" from then-L.A. Fire Chief Kristin Crowley and her subordinates.
On Feb. 19, City Hall reporter David Zahniser petitioned 'copies of correspondence regarding emergency preparations, high winds, wildfire conditions and the National Weather Service" involving City Council President Marqueece Harris Dawson while he served as acting mayor in Bass' absence.
Zahniser received some records, but not the text messages he'd asked for. Tchekmedyian's request was denied in total.
Questions about how American leaders communicate and what happens to those exchanges gained new urgency this week after senior White House officials were revealed to have mistakenly added a journalist to their Signal group chat while planning an air raid in Yemen.
Read more: With billions at stake, lawyers pour into Altadena and race to courthouse
On Thursday, Washington, D.C. Federal District Judge James E. Basberg ordered the participants of that chat to save the exchange in its entirety and to turn over their records of it.
Shading such material from public records laws now on the argument they're fleeting and inconsequential defies reality, The Times' attorney said.
"What you have to retain and what you have to turn over is based on the content of the communication, not based on the form or manner of the communication that you choose to use," Avilas said.
The suit seeks to ensure important records "are not just destroyed at the city's whim."
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.